Opinion

Instructure has responded to the unplanned downtime of its cloud based Canvas LMS on 8/20/12 with a client/public facing communications plan.

As we begin a new school year, I'm sure many of us are prompted to reflect on the challenges and opportunities ahead. Perhaps you are taking on a new leadership role or confronting some other professional change which brings both anticipation and apprehension. For those of you looking for answers or inspiration, might I suggest you turn to Joyce Carol Oates' most recent novel Mudwoman?

As a grad student in my last year of study, I enjoy a pretty flexible schedule and work environment. I work from home a few days a week, and conduct a lot of my research in online spaces, so being constantly connected to the internet is essential for me. However, this constant connectivity is a double-edged sword; I find myself distracted from my work almost as often as I'm focused on it, and as I settle in to struggle with my dissertation and job market materials, I have a hard time shutting out the siren song of Facebook. Lucky for me, a cottage industry of anti-distraction apps has sprung up to keep people like me from destroying themselves one tweet at a time. Here are a few of them.

Before these massive online courses truly transform higher education, they need to focus on some key teaching issues, writes Gary S. May.

Universities are going to have difficulty if they continue to claim the content of the new courses is of the same caliber as traditional courses, and yet decline to award full credit, writes David Touve.

If non-elite colleges and universities want to avoid the fate of travel agencies and film companies, what should they do in the age of free MOOCs?

I'm tired of being used by the digital tools.

Have I told you how much I love audiobooks? Have I mentioned how much I enjoy the instant purchasing, lower prices, and multi-platform flexibility of Kindle e-books? Have we talked about our concerns about the ever widening gap between the curriculum and consumer content experience? Well, things have just gotten better. And things have just gotten worse.